So You Hate Your Boss...What Else is New?

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

  Career Development  

You hate your boss and that's all there is to it. This person has become bigger than life, a five-headed monster who has made your job--and your life--miserable. It's hard to find someone who hasn't had a problem with a boss at some point in his her or her career. As any seasoned project manager will tell you, the higher you go on the corporate power ladder, the more you earn, the bigger the budgets you are responsible for--and the more complicated the boss-manager relationship.

But no matter how desperate and unhappy you are, you'd be making a big mistake if you followed Johnny Paycheck's lead and told your boss "to take this job and shove it!" It's good advice if you want to get fired, but if you want to keep your job and make piece with the situation, there are better tactics--some or all of which might work under the right conditions. Consider the following strategies:

1. Tune out your boss.

This is the backbone of a strategy touted by Lyle Sussman, University of Louisville management professor and author of What To Say To Get What You Want (Addison Wesley). Simply, Sussman says tuning out your boss involves focusing only on your work. In order for this strategy to work, he says you have to be able to do the following:

• Put personalities aside.
• Create a legacy for your future work.
• Turn your boss into an irrelevant issue.
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